Comment Short term vs long term (Score 1) 84
We are really good at overestimating the potential capabilities on short term and underestimating them on the long term.
Comment Re:Gotta ask yourself (Score 1) 92
The value, if you can call it that, is the vetting. The publisher is willing to invest in an author, so there *may* be something to their writing. They allow me to concentrate on a dozen rather than hundreds of candidates. The problem with self-publishing is the lack of a reliable filter.
This is essentially form of marketing. It allows me to find a publication that would have been otherwise effectively buried and never even heard of. In this context marketing adds value not just to the author but to me as a consumer as well.
Comment Re:Boiling frogs (Score 1) 143
You could also take the opposite spin on this: There is no secure internet access to begin with so why wouldn't you choose faster connection over more secure, but still compromised connection? Use SSL, TLS, SSH and the like where you need to be secure and assume that everything else is compromised. Why would one assume that their ISP is secure? Always assume that somebody is eavesdropping the connection, or running an active MITM against you, and consider if your mitigation actions are sufficient?
Would I consider TLS with SHA-1 to be sufficient for accessing Slashdot over potentially compromised network? Yes. In worst case my Slashdot account would be compromised, no big deal.
Would I consider the same to be sufficient for the company payment interface? No, I wouldn't.
Comment Re:Speed an issue (Score 1) 244
Hey, don't be mean! MySQL supports it as well
How Mark Zuckerberg's Altruism Helps Himself (nytimes.com) 240
HughPickens.com writes: Jesse Eisinger writes in the NYT that if you heard that Mark Zuckerberg donated $45 billion to charity, you are wrong. Here's what really happened: Zuckerberg did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. Instead Zuckerberg created an investment vehicle called a limited liability company (LLC) that can invest in for-profit companies, make political donations, and lobby for changes in the law. What's more an LLC can donate appreciated shares to charity, which will generate a deduction at fair market value of the stock without triggering any tax. "He remains completely free to do as he wishes with his money," writes Eisinger. "That's what America is all about. But as a society, we don't generally call these types of activities 'charity.'"
A charitable foundation is subject to rules and oversight. It has to allocate a certain percentage of its assets every year. The new Zuckerberg LLC won't be subject to those rules and won't have any transparency requirements. According to Eisinger what this means is that Zuckerberg has amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it. "Instead of lavishing praise on Mr. Zuckerberg for having issued a news release with a promise, this should be an occasion to mull what kind of society we want to live in," concludes Eisinger. "The point is that we are turning into a society of oligarchs. And I am not as excited as some to welcome the new Silicon Valley overlords."
A charitable foundation is subject to rules and oversight. It has to allocate a certain percentage of its assets every year. The new Zuckerberg LLC won't be subject to those rules and won't have any transparency requirements. According to Eisinger what this means is that Zuckerberg has amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it. "Instead of lavishing praise on Mr. Zuckerberg for having issued a news release with a promise, this should be an occasion to mull what kind of society we want to live in," concludes Eisinger. "The point is that we are turning into a society of oligarchs. And I am not as excited as some to welcome the new Silicon Valley overlords."
Feds Have a Plan For Catastrophic Solar Flares (digitaljournal.com) 188
New submitter Steve Sacco, referencing the newly released National Space Weather Strategy and the National Space Weather Action Plan, written in anticipation of large-scale disruptions from a solar flare or similar event, writes: Released on October 28, 2015, the White House plan involves the coordination of agencies from the federal level, state level, and including emergency managers, academia, the media, the insurance industry, nonprofit organizations and the private sector, all in preparation for the worst-case scenario possible, such as the Carrington Event that took place in 1859.
Comment Re:Yelp is so full of shit sometimes (Score 1) 77
No, I need the review to avoid being ripped off.
Comment Re:Global warming (Score 2, Insightful) 160
No, it's not downsizing, it's just restructuring overlapping functions after all the mergers.
Comment Re:whine (Score 3, Insightful) 226
My experience on this is that you need 'DevOps' to run the development environments but you need production ops to run, eh, production.
DevOps people don't necessarily have good understanding of the underlying issues of the production environment. There are several issues revolving around this: Security, availability, scalability, etc. As an example is dev who can secure the application but not the platform (database, web servers and so on).
Good handovers between the two are the key for success. If 'DevOps' changes the development environment in a significant way this needs to be taken into account when moving the version to production. Oh, you upgraded the database in development environment? I guess that explains why RTP failed and we had to roll back.
Some changes may be very simple to do in development environment, while difficult in production environment. Need some extra disk and upgrade your database backend? Sure, just get it done in the development environment but there may some issues when doing that in production environment; you may need unacceptable amount of downtime, etc...
Comment Pre-Alpha? (Score 1) 89
Is "Pre-Alpha" same as Beta used to be before Google?
Comment Re:"easier for non-programmers to build applicatio (Score 2) 268
That sounds like a Structure Query Language that was developed some years ago to allow business users to query databases. It would free programmers to focus on programming instead of running reports. Looks like it worked pretty well.
Comment Re: And the pilot? (Score 1) 249
I'm not sure about the currency you got there, but it doesn't really matter: 100 currency units is cheap for 3-5 hours of flying, no matter what currency! I'd have to pay almost 3-5 times more than that for flying.
On the other hand 100 EUR will get me 3-5 skydives in Europe or 100 USD will get me 3-5 skydives in US.
Comment Re:Ill just use my 4G (Score 1) 67
Why connect to a free and often slow/overloaded wifi when most people get acceptable 3/4G service around town ?
Because my "service provider" charges me my first born son for roaming data.
Submission + - Boeing Solid-State Laser Weapon System Outshines Expectations (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: The likelihood of lasers appearing on the battlefield was boosted last week when Boeing announced that its Thin Disk Laser system had achieved unexpected levels of power and efficiency. In a recent demonstration for the US Department of Defense, the laser’s output was 30 percent higher than project requirements and had greater beam quality, a result which paves the way toward a practical tactical laser weapon.
Submission + - "Jekyll" test attack sneaks through Apple App Store, wreaks havoc on iOS (networkworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Acting like a software version of a Transformer robot, a malware test app sneaked through Apple’s review process disguised as a harmless app, and then re-assembled itself into an aggressive attacker even while running inside the iOS “sandbox” designed to isolate apps and data from each other. The app, dubbed Jekyll, was helped by Apple’s review process. The malware designers, a research team from Georgia Institute of Technology’s Information Security Center, were able to monitor their app during the review: they discovered Apple ran the app for only a few seconds, before ultimately approving it. That wasn’t anywhere near long enough to discover Jekyll’s deceitful nature.
